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In the winter of 2013, film-makers Toby Oppenheimer and Dana Flor took a bunch of Washington DC street kids for a burger at a local branch of the fast-food chain Denny’s. They’d heard about the Check It gang from local radio DJ Ronald “Mo” Moten while researching a documentary on go-go, the raw, indigenous Washington DC music genre. “He said these kids are like nobody you’ve ever met,” says Flor. The go-go doc was soon abandoned. Trouble Funk would have to wait.

The Check It are the first documented, gay American street gang to make it to film. They were formed in 2009 in the footfall of Barack Obama’s White House, in response to escalating homophobic crime in the US capitol, by a crew of black ninth-graders who decided to fight back.

“I want the world to see another side of DC,” says Flor, looking back to the germination of Check It, the arresting feature that sprung from Moten’s introduction and bowed to rapturous applause at last year’s Tribeca film festival in New York. “It’s not the White House. The Check It embody so many of our failures as a nation.”

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Some of the Check It go to the same public school as Flor’s teenage kids. “It is so shameful to me,” she says, “that this could go on in a city that is very wealthy and well educated. There are countless organisations that are funding programmes across the world while failing to see what is directly under our noses.”

In Check It, a familiarly cinematic gay narrative of victimhood and bullying is wrestled back by the gang, an elastic cooperative of whip-smart 14-22-year-olds who spring to one another’s defence at the ping of a WhatsApp alert. They are known and feared in the economically deprived Ward 8 district for carrying ice-picks in their clutch-bags. Most are disenfranchised by the state, church, school and family, the hard details of which they share to camera. Many have a string of drug and sex-work-related convictions. “They are the marginalised of the marginalised,” notes Oppenheimer, “forgotten by everyone. When you’re with them day in, day out, you see how their wiring has been so fucked with on so many levels.”

The film follows a select bunch of the tenacious Check It gang as they are put through their paces at a local fashion camp and taught the rigours of the boxing ring, maximising their self-taught strengths, finding a bittersweet spot somewhere between Raging Bull and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Oppenheimer and Flor’s feature is made with the same maternal eye that Jennie Livingston cast over the vogueing scene in 1990’s evergreen documentary Paris Is Burning, and carries a dose of the tart wit of recent LA transgender travelogue Tangerine. “They’re about having the courage to be who you are in spite of great peril,” says Flor. “They really do lay their lives on the line every day they wake up and walk down the street.”

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Because it falls into a world of Black Lives Matter and domestic LGBT activism on the presidential doorstep, Check It is very much its own work. “To be honest,” says Flor, “it saddens me how little has changed. The Check It are very much still on the margins of all that. They don’t get support from anyone.”

After the producers put out a funding call in 2015, Steve Buscemi was introduced to Check It by his production partner. He sent Flor back a three-letter text message after seeing the trailer: “WTF?” Buscemi told comic Louis CK about the film while the two were filming online sitcom Horace and Pete. And because CK’s own work walks a similar line between sadness and joy, he has joined its famous fans: you can stream the film on CK’s website. Meanwhile, the ribbon-snipping ceremony on a bricks-and-mortar Check It shop, selling fashions crafted by the partially reformed gang, was performed earlier this year by Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser. The political establishment is beginning to notice, while Flor and Oppenheimer remain committed to their cast.

“To say that a bunch of white, middle-aged film-makers hanging out with a black gay gang is chill, and they never noticed?” quizzes Flor. “No. We really stand out. But as film-makers, what you want to do is to dive into that world. You have to make sure they believe they are not having a story imposed on them. I’m not being objective here. I care really strongly for them. I am intimately tied to the Check It. These kids are my heroes.”